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Tuesday, December 6, 2011

My Mini Christmas Tree

Hey friends! This is another post that I did for Crafting a Green World, but I wanted to share it with my readers as well!

I love decorating for Christmas, but I refuse to pay an insane amount for an item that will spend a month out in the open, and the remaining 11 months of the year in a box in the attic. My cheap self just won't allow it. I saw several adorable little Christmas trees at the store that inspired me to think of this project. Using what I already had, this is what I came up with:

1. Put the little rocks into your bottle. I only glued the branches on one side so I needed something to keep the bottle from tipping over. I had little rocks (you know, the ones you can put in a vase as a filler) so that's what I used. I'm sure you could use other items on hand though. Be creative with it!

2. Start gluing your branches to your bottle. (Disclaimer: This is the part where you will be tempted to pull your hair out and be mad at the world. But, have patience and stick it out.) You will want to start at the bottom and work your way up to the top. I also used thicker sticks at the bottom to make it look like a legit tree. You will start it like this:

Make sure each "layer" is dry before moving on-- again, this is where your patience will be tested. If I could go back and redo my tree, I wouldn't put as much hot glue. I was so impatient to let every layer dry that I just kept slapping hot glue on there... which turned out to be not so pretty.

3. Once you've worked all the way up to the top of the bottle, you will take a long branch and put it inside the bottle (you might have to move your rocks around a little bit). This will become the top of your tree and the place where you will eventually glue your star.

4. Spray paint the branches/bottle. You could leave it natural if you wanted to, but I was forced to spray paint mine because it looked like a hott mess with all of the hot glue.

5. Once that's dry, you will take your twine and kind of "weave" it through the branches. I didn't glue the twine down because it stayed in place, but that's completely up to you.

6. Hot glue the mini jingle bells onto random branches. These will become the "ornaments" for the tree.

7. Cut a star out of the yellow paper. I just used a scrap piece that I had in my craft supplies. Then, glue it to the top of your tree.

Now I have a cute (and cheap) mini Christmas tree on my mantle!

What do you think? Do you have any other cute mini Christmas tree ideas? Leave me a comment with a link to your Christmas tree projects-- I'd love to see them!